“Because I let myself be vulnerable with you and then I thought it was nothing to you. It made me feel embarrassed and ashamed. You made me feel stupid.”
“Are you even hearing me? I. Did. Not. That shame never came from me. That came from you. You assumed. You thought you knew what I was feeling, but God Ci, you never had a fucking clue. You never saw yourself the way I saw you. Did I hate that every night you took your clothes off for other guys? That you danced for them? Yes. Did I hate that you made them all want you? Yes, but none of that ever mattered because you were always more than that to me. None of those bastards knew the real you, not the way I did. None of them ever got a piece of you. And what was between us was real. Is real, and that night I tried to get you to admit that you were lying when you said it wasn’t, but you pushed me away and ran. It was weeks before we got back to being us, and I couldn’t risk you doing that again. So, I gave you more time, and a year later, I asked you to be my date to the birthday dinner my parents were throwing for me, and when my brother said something to you about how good he thought we were together, you couldn’t correct him fast enough, telling him how I was only using you as my date to keep our match making mother at bay, and then you flirted with him.”
“Because that’s what I thought! You were always complaining about your mother trying to set you up, so when you asked me, I thought you were asking me as a friend, to help you out!”
He shook his head, laughing dryly. “God, we’ve both been so stupid. Mostly you though,” he added humorlessly.
I glared. “Maybe if you had just been more open and up front, there wouldn’t have been all the confusion. I’m not a mind reader or a psychic. I didn’t know how you felt.”
“Okay, then I was the bigger idiot, but can you blame me? You mocked love and the saps who believed in it. And when you stayed with me, there were those nights we were up all night watching movies and talking, I thought finally you were opening your eyes. But I was wrong. The night you fell asleep in my bed, and woke up in my arms was the last night you stayed with me. You panicked in the morning and that day you moved out and went to stay with LuAnne.”
“Because I was afraid of what you made me feel, and I was afraid you didn’t feel the same,” I confessed. I remembered clearly what I’d felt the morning I woke up in his bed, his arms around me. I’d felt peace and perfection, and like I was home for the first time in my life. It was terrifying, and later I told myself it was because I’d never shared a bed with someone I truly cared about, never been held like that.
“Sometimes, I think you’re more afraid of the idea of me loving you than me not loving you,” Luke said softly.
Twenty-Four
Luke
Present
“I think, you’re right.”
I looked up in shock at her words. I never expected to hear her admit it. Her eyes were sad and a little bit hopeless. I couldn’t take it. I stood and moved to sit beside her.
“There’s nothing for you to be afraid of. I’ve got you, if you’ll let me.”
“But there is so much to be afraid of,” she replied, not meeting my eyes.
“Then tell me. Tell me what you’re afraid of,” I urged her softly, going so far as to even take her hand in mine the way I’d wanted to for so long.
At first, she said nothing and I thought she was shutting down on me. After a minute, her head slowly turned and her dejected eyes met mine. “My father cheats on my mother. Has their entire marriage. I caught him once, when I was seventeen. I was so angry at him. So hurt and betrayed for my mother. I started to feel bad for all the fights I’d ever had with her, all the times I’d been angry at her. I didn’t know how I was going to tell her. I thought for sure it would break her heart, but it turned out she didn’t even care. She already knew. In fact, she had her own affairs.
“That’s what their marriage was. A complete sham, built on lies and appearances. They had no love for each other. They married for other reasons, more practical ones. Do you have any idea what that did to me?” My heart wrenched, because I could imagine seventeen-year-old Ci, having her world rocked like that.
“I think I have an idea.”
She grew quiet again, and I struggled for something to say, some way to tell her I understood, but she spoke again before I could.
“My brother is gay.”
“What?”
“Yeah,” she sighed. “But I’m the only one who knows, at least I was last time I talked to him. That was two years ago. I yelled at him for living his life in the closet, hiding who he is for fear of disappointing my parents. I was cruel to him, and now I realize, who was I to lecture him when I’m no better? He got married to a girl he dated all through college. It was when he called me to tell me he’d proposed that I went off on him. Told him I wouldn’t go to the wedding and support his lie. His wife thinks he loves her, when the truth is that he’s been in love with his best friend since high school, and nobody knows but me. It’s all just more lies and he’s miserable, but acts like he’s the happiest guy in the world even though he can’t be who he is or be with who he wants. And I’ve been lying to myself, convinced that the only way I wouldn’t end up like them was if I just never fell in love. But telling myself I didn’t love you was the biggest lie I could have told.
“And that terrifies me,” she ducked her eyes again, “because it means you can hurt me, or worse, I could hurt you. One of us could just wake up one morning and stop loving the other, or maybe one of us will meet someone else, or maybe we’ll just fight all the time until we hate each other.”
I squeezed her hand until she looked at me again. “We already fight all the time, but I could never hate you. In six years, there’s never been anyone else. There’s not going to be, and even on your worst day, when I think you’re the most stubborn, frustrating, difficult person I’ve ever met, it’s still only you I want to fight with. You’re right that feelings change and emotions fade, but I don’t think feelings and emotions are all that love is. I think it goes quite a bit deeper than that, to the soul of a person, and once two souls are entwined, they’re not easily separated.”
“But how do we know that’s what this is? How do we know we’re not being fooled by emotions?”
“Answer me this, what’s your greatest fear in all of this?”
She replied immediately, “Losing you.”
“Then you won’t. The thing you fear losing the most is the thing you’ll fight hardest to hang onto, and I feel the same way about you. I had no intention of letting you walk out of this room until you were mine. I’ll fight; with you, for you, every day, whatever it takes. That’s what I think it takes to make it, to not end up like your parents, or your brother. Two people willing to fight. For each other and against anything that would tear them apart. Even if the thing that tries to tear us apart is us.”
A barely there smile touched her lips, and there was a soft look I’d never seen in her eyes when she looked up at me this time. “I guess if there’s one thing we’ve proven we’re good at, it’s fighting.”
I couldn’t help my own grin. “That we have.” I let myself fall backward on the mattress, pulling her down with me. She settled in the crook of my arm and I skimmed my fingers in soft patterns over her arm.
“We’re really doing this?” she whispered.
“Yeah, we are.”
It was funny. I thought once I had her in my arms and she was mine the first thing I would do would be go all caveman and show her just how mine she was. I thought there would be the tearing off of clothes in an urgency to have her, to brand her skin with mine, to sink deep inside her. Instead, I felt a calm sort of peacefulness, like I didn’t need to do any of that.
We’d get there, I had no doubt. It was only a matter of time before she’d have me feeling combustible, but at that moment, I merely closed my eyes, listened to the sound of my own steady heartbeat and her slow, quiet breathing. If contentment had a sound, it would be that.
Slowly, the light in t
he room began to recede as the sun that streaked through the partially closed drapes sank lower in the desert giving way to night in Sin City.
Every so often the quiet was disrupted when one of us would whisper something; a question, a memory we suddenly saw in a different light now that everything was out in the open, a comment about the future, random nothings that seemed like everything, and those three words that really were everything.
We’d crawled higher on the bed so our legs weren’t dangling off the edge of the mattress, but instead were stretched diagonally across it. My arm eventually grew numb and I had to piss, yet I couldn’t bring myself to move. It was only when I couldn’t stand another second, that I finally forced myself up.
When I came out of the bathroom, she was sitting, pressed up against the headboard, her arms hugging her knees to her chest and her eyes tracking my every move as I approached the bed again. Something almost playful entered her gaze. I slowed a step. Her eyes traveled from top to bottom and back up. Then she lifted her little index finger and crooked it at me.
I went to her, placing one hand on the mattress beside her hip and the other on the headboard as I leaned over her. Her hand shot out and clutched the fabric of my tee. “Closer,” she breathed, tugging me to her. I bent my head and she shifted onto her knees before sitting back on her heels.
“That’s better,” she said once we were nose to nose.
“You’ve got me where you want me, now what are you going to do?” The corners of her mouth twitched and I felt her fingers curl tighter into my shirt before she yanked my mouth down to hers. Our lips smashed together. Hers tasted of the pink tinted, grapefruit lip balm she wore, and I didn’t even care that I was going to have it all over mine.
I sank my knee into the mattress and lifted my hand from the bedding and tangled it in the hair at her nape, arching her neck as I crushed my lips harder on hers. A breathy gasp parted her lips and I flicked my tongue, first over her bottom lip and then inside.
Pent up desire unfurled in my gut, unleashing a torrent of lust that had me hardening in seconds. I claimed her mouth the way I wanted to claim her body, hard and slow, taking my time to ravish her with kisses, stoking the fire as need built into an inferno that would soon demand I stop going slow.
Her hands clutched at me, snaking around my sides, her fingers digging into my back and sending another sharp bolt of desire through me.
I pushed up from the bed, hooking my hands around her knees, and yanking her legs out from under her bottom until she was flat on her back, looking up at me with heavy lidded eyes, biting her bottom lip between her teeth, the fading sunlight, not yet diminished, casting her in a dim, sexy glow.
I crawled over the top of her, caging her between my body and the bed. The depths of her pale blue eyes drew me in, narrowing my world to just this. There was nothing else but her. I nipped at her jaw and she tilted her head back, exposing the slender column of her neck that was too enticing to resist. I grazed my lips and teeth along her throat all the way over to her shoulder, laying soft kisses and gentle bites as I went, begrudging the shirt that got in my way.
I quickly rectified that, sitting up and tugging it off. She raised her arms over her head to allow it to slip free. Once I’d tossed it aside, I took her wrists in one hand and kept them pinned there. Her beautiful breasts, covered by a scrap of red–the color that had taunted and tortured me for too long–jutted up with every rapid and ragged breath she sucked in.
I palmed her stomach, sliding my hand up, between her breasts as her chest heaved. Then I followed the same path with my lips. Her skin was like heated silk and she shuddered as I made my way up her body. I slid my hand around to her back and released the clasp there. Her red bra joined her shirt on the floor.
I’d be lying if I said there weren’t a hundred nights I’d dreamed of this body, dreamed of having her beneath me, bare, flushed, and needy.
Her back arched when I closed my mouth around one breast, flicking the stiff nipple with my tongue and then scraping my teeth over it.
I took turns lavishing attention on her breasts with my mouth and one hand while she squirmed and struggled to break free of the other. I took mercy on her after several minutes of teasing and torturing and let go of her wrists. She grabbed for me, her hands gripping my shoulders, then trailing down my arms, slipping around my back, before grabbing at the hem of my shirt, seeking to remove it.
The rest of our clothing was quick to follow and ended up strewn across the floor until everywhere our bodies touched it was skin to skin. Hands, teeth, tongues, and lips were everywhere; exploring, biting, tasting. I trailed my hand down her stomach to the sweet spot between her legs. She bucked and sank her teeth into my shoulder when I grazed a finger through her hot, wet center before slipping it inside her.
We became a tangle of limbs set to the soundtrack of soft pants and breathy moans as we took turns drawing pleasure from each other until the need was too great. I pried myself away long enough to swiftly retrieve a foil packet from my things and tear it open. With protection in place, I settled my body in the cradle of her thighs. I cupped her cheek and lowered my lips to hers tenderly, this kiss achingly sweet and slow and deep as I sank inside her.
Her lips parted and her head tilted back, breaking the kiss. I dropped my forehead to the crook of her neck once I was fully sheathed inside her. She tangled one hand in my hair and the other slowly raked down my spine leaving a delicious wake of fire as her nails bit into my skin. It was all the urging I needed.
With slow, hard thrusts, I began to move, dragging more breathless moans from her. She tilted her hips and raised her knees higher, meeting my thrusts, matching them. Her hands slid down to my ass and the dig of her fingers spurred me on. My movements became harder and faster. I lay kisses all over her jaw and neck, dragging my lips to her ear. I tugged the lobe between my teeth, tugging, sucking, biting, before I released it. Every ragged breath, every soft moan and pleasure filled gasp I coaxed from her lips only fueled my own pleasure and drove me with a single-minded desperation to make her come harder than she ever had before.
I felt when her entire body tensed and clenched around me just before she broke on a silent cry, tiny tremors racking her body. Her fingers nails bit sharply into the flesh of my back and her head slammed back against the pillow as she continued to come apart.
I felt the tremors begin to recede and her body go lax. Her hand drifted up my back, coming to curl around my neck. I was so close, and with a renewed frenzy I slammed into her over and over, but it was when she tugged my head down, and her teeth clamped down on my shoulder that a harsh groan slid from my lips as wave after wave of pleasure crashed over me and I came, shuddering.
I held myself up on shaky arms as the last drops of pleasure were coaxed from me before I collapsed and rolled off of her onto my back, completely sated and entirely depleted.
Ci rolled to her side and curled herself against me, resting her head on my chest. I tucked my arm under her and held her to me. It felt like several minutes before either of us said anything. Her soft breath tickled my chest and with every inhale, I breathed in the scent of her shampoo combined with our sex.
My thumb made gentle, lazy circles on her upper arm and when her breathing slowed, I thought for a second that she’d fallen asleep. I was close myself, unable to remember the last time I’d felt this relaxed and contented.
“I don’t know why we waited so long for that,” she breathed and I let out a short laugh.
“If I had known being with you was going to feel like this I would have fought a lot harder for us a lot sooner,” I told her.
She tilted her head to look up at me. “This feels good. And right,” she sighed.
“Yeah it does.” I bent and placed a kiss on her forehead.
She nodded off shortly after, and though I felt tired enough to sleep for a week, I lay there enjoying the feel of her in my arms, her breath on my skin and the memory of what we’d done forever etched in my mind. Whe
n she woke again, we showered together, exploring and enjoying each other even further. Then, naked and still warm from the hot water, we climbed back into bed where I kept her in my arms, determined that we would have many more nights exactly like this one.
All of them if I had my way.
Twenty-Five
Cici
Present
Road Trip to Hell Day 9
Or maybe it was Heaven …
I lazed with my arms folded across Luke’s chest, chin resting on them, my eyes taking in every detail of his face in sleep. I had one leg curled over his hip, his morning hardness brushed against my thigh, and I knew it wouldn’t be long before he woke. Something warm unfurled from my stomach and spread through my body making me feel light as a feather, like if I didn’t keep myself tethered to Luke, I might float up to the ceiling.
The last time I awoke to find myself similarly wrapped around a sleeping Luke, I’d had a moment much like this one, where I looked at him, smiled, felt the pleasant stirrings in my tummy, and then panicked. I’d quickly shoved myself off him, waking him in the process, and when his eyes had flitted open and saw me still in his bed, I hadn’t been able to get out of his room fast enough. I’d worried then that I was playing with fire, risking my emotions growing deeper into something I knew I shouldn’t feel.
I moved out of his place that day and stayed with LuAnne for a week until I could get into a new apartment. Prior to that night I’d felt no rush. He was easy to live with from the beginning. It almost felt natural for us to be roommates; we eased into cohabitating so effortlessly and comfortably, none of that awkward feeling each other out and hiding our bad habits or tiptoeing around each other while we figured out how to make it work.
Looking back now, there were so many signs that this was always how we were going to end up, that he and I made sense in so many ways I’d been blind to or refused to see.
This time I wasn’t going to run, at least I hoped not. Running from the tough stuff was a habit I wanted to break. It wasn’t a part of who I wanted to be anymore. And leaving Luke now felt like I’d be giving up some vital part of myself. I had to make this work. Had to.
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